Building Hyper-Specific Brand Personas with Audience Segmentation

You need to understand your customers in order to provide solutions to solve their problems.

Along with targeting and product positioning, audience segmentation is a critical step in this direction. It helps you tailor your products and services to meet the needs and preferences of customers with similar goals, interests, and challenges.

Buyer personas are the best tools for audience segmentation and help you create in-depth profiles of key customer groups.

With automatic persona generation (APG), you can build personas that not only describe the demographic, psychographic, and behavioral traits of your buyers but also identify your brand's best-performing audience segments.

Discover how Bask Suncare, a Miami based company dedicated to ending skin cancer, uses APG to build brand personas that help them achieve a better understanding of their customer base.

About the Company

Bask Suncare is a skincare brand with an ambitious goal to eliminate skin cancer by providing quality sunscreen products. As a part of this endeavor, they partner with The Skin Protection Foundation (SPF) to raise cancer awareness and improve access to sunscreen.

The company approaches sun safety in a fun and humorous manner. Bask makes it an enjoyable process, accessible to everyone, with playful product packaging, luxurious formulas, and effortless application.

Through its "SPF It Forward" initiative, Bask further donates 10% of its sales profits and thousands of sunscreen units to nonprofit partners. This cements their goal to combat skin cancer and encourage sun care as an essential part of people’s daily activities.

The Problem

A problem common to businesses in many industries, Bask Suncare faced a challenge when it came to understanding the wants of its target audience.

Now the company knew that it had a diverse customer base, but it struggled to identify best-performing audience segments and build personas that could actually guide marketing campaigns.

Essentially, Bask required a tool that offered insights into customer interests, lifestyles, personalities, communication preferences, habits, and purchase patterns.

The Solution

Bask signed up for Persona by Delve AI, an automatic persona generation software, to create effective brand personas.

Persona by Delve AI is an AI-powered tool that generates data-driven personas for a business. It combines first-party data with public data sources and competitor intelligence to create detailed personas for your business and social media handles.

Our tool enabled Bask to automatically segment their online audience by analyzing their web analytics (Google Analytics and Search Console), social audiences, and customer data, then merging it with over 40+ data sources.

The Implementation

As we have stated before, buyer personas are the best way to segment your marketing audiences. Bask’s customer data was used to create multiple personas – their prospects were grouped into transacting and non-transacting buyer segments.

Each persona displayed the following attributes:

• Buyers' goals, challenges, triggers, and barriers
• Lifestyle, interests, values, and hobbies
• Preferences (news, sports, travel, music, and television)
• Products purchased or likely to be purchased
• Resonating pages and topics
• Industry specific insights and keywords related to the skincare and personal care industry
• Traffic acquisition channels and keywords
• Sample user journeys to see how visitors interacted with the website

The personas generated also provided:

• Demographic distribution by age, gender, language, and job profile
• Behavioral activity, including engagement, actions, intent and decision-making process
• Geographic context at the city, region, country, and continent levels

According to Teresa Fuller, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Partnerships, Bask Suncare, “It's fascinating how [Delve AI] reads through heaps of analytics and distills them into clear, actionable insights about our customer base. This isn't just a general overview; we're talking about detailed, nuanced profiles like the time of day our personas wake-up in the morning and if they wear long sleeves or short sleeves.”

Delve AI’s user-friendly approach helped Bask to seamlessly integrate the generated personas into their existing brand materials.

Marketing campaigns and communication strategies were refined using creatives and content that resonated with the preferences, lifestyles, values, and interests of the desired customer segment.

Results

Bask Suncare has witnessed significant changes by leveraging Delve AI for audience segmentation and incorporating buyer personas in their day-to-day marketing activities.

• Improved customer satisfaction: By addressing the unique needs and challenges of their target audience, they were able to uplift customer experiences, retain prospects, and build long-lasting relationships.
• Focused marketing efforts: With targeted messaging and campaigns, Bask was able to allocate resources in the right direction and achieve better results.
• Boosted brand loyalty: Customer satisfaction has directly impacted brand loyalty; resulting in increased repeat purchases and customer referrals.

Final Thoughts

Bask Suncare's experience with Delve AI reinstates the influence of buyer personas in audience segmentation. By gaining a deeper understanding of its customers' preferences and behaviors, Bask has been able to strengthen its brand identity, improve customer experiences, and make a greater impact on its mission.